


but the cat came back

by editingatwork



Category: Check Please! (Webcomic)
Genre: Body Horror, Concussions, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Injury Recovery, Major Character Injury, Pet Sematary if the pets weren't evil, Resurrection, how much does Kent Parson love his cat, pet death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-28
Updated: 2019-10-28
Packaged: 2021-01-05 17:18:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,531
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21212240
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/editingatwork/pseuds/editingatwork
Summary: Kit dies. But she doesn't stay that way.





	but the cat came back

**Author's Note:**

> _The cat came back the very next day_   
_The cat came back, they thought he was a goner_   
_But the cat came back; he just couldn't stay away_

Kit dies on a Thursday. Kent wakes up to her soft body limp on the pillow next to him, stiff rigor mortis already setting in. She’s only six years old.

Cancer, the autopsy finds. Deadly and undetected. They offer to cremate her body but Kent declines. He accepts her stitched up corpse with numb hands, puts it in the carrier and takes it home in some macabre parody of another routine vet checkup. Once in his driveway, he sits there for nearly an hour just staring at the unopened garage door. Wondering if there were signs. Blaming himself for missing them. Resisting the urge to bang his face bloody on the steering wheel and put himself on IR for a few games. He’d deserve it, for putting his career ahead of her.

He does not do that. He parks his car, gets the carrier out of the front seat, and roots around the garage for a shovel.

Lucky for him, Vegas Decembers are warm enough that the earth gives easily. His backyard looks out on dry desert and distant mountains. Sun beats down on him and the dirt is a cheery rust-yellow-brown. Putting Kit to rest out here feels less like a solemn burial and more like an offering to an indifferent, smiling god.

Kent does it anyway. He pads the bottom of the grave with Kit’s favorite blanket and arranges her toys around her. It doesn’t make her look alive, like he’d hoped. She just looks more dead. He can see the stitches where they sewed up her eyes. Evidence of the cancer that ate her spine and jaw and brain.

It feels like someone else is moving his hands as he buries her. Someone else has lost his best friend, someone else is tossing dirt on an unmoving body, someone else is staring at a mound of minced earth and trying to stay standing in a world that has come to a choking, bruising, shuddering, rib-breaking stop. Like being in a car crash. The seatbelt and the airbag caught him from going headfirst out the window, but he’s still black and blue from the impact.

“Give her back, you prick,” he whispers at the endless horizon of cacti and rock.

It takes him forever to make the decision to turn and walk back into the house.

\--

He shows up to practice the next day and smiles and tells no one. The tears dried when he finally passed out in bed last night, and he washed his face thoroughly. They have a game to play. Kent plays it. Then the next, then the next. A week passes.

He goes on a six-day road trip with the team and gets several frantic texts from his cat sitter. He lies and says that Kit is staying with a friend; apologizes for forgetting to tell her, for scaring her.

Pucks and goals and cellies and bruises and fights and wins and losses.

Bars and drinking and friends and cold hotel beds.

Home is a mausoleum. Nothing has moved. Dust settles and there are no paws to stir it up.

Kent drinks and goes to bed aching.

He wakes up to fur and paws and a coarse, creaking, “Meow!”

Half the sheets come with him as he falls out of bed.

“Meow!” yells Kit from the dirt-stained pillow. Her eyes are still sewn shut, and from the floor, Kent can see the stiches in her belly.

\--

She only eats wet food, now. Kent had been afraid to put his fingers within reach. When he finally gets the courage, Kit only sniffs them. Her fur is patchy and a sour smell of disturbed earth clings to her.

She plays with her toys as energetically as always. A lack of eyes doesn’t bother her. Her voice is awful at first, dry and deep and choking on dust. But by the third day it’s clear as a bell. It rings through Kent’s home like Christmas bells.

\--

“Dude, you look awful,” someone says about a month after Kit’s resurrection.

Kent shrugs off the chirp and puts on his gear and plays hockey. But later, after practice, he puts himself in front of a mirror in private and studies his face. There are dark circles under his pink-tinted eyes, which look even worse against his doughy pallor—or maybe it’s just the lights? He pulls off his shirt. He doesn’t remember his muscles and bones being that well-defined, like the fat’s been sucked out.

Nothing feels off, though. Every meal is an exercise in gluttony, and at night he sleeps like the dead.

He sleeps better at home, with Kit curled up against him, purring in dissonance with his heartbeat. Her fur has grown back and the stitches were pushed out of her healed skin. Except for the eyes, she’s almost completely back to normal. That’s all Kent cares about.

\--

Christmas comes and goes. The Aces win and lose. Kent wakes up one morning to find Kit staring back at him.

“Is everything okay, Kent?” asks their coach two days later after practice. “You’re looking… well, a little thin, these days.”

“I’m fine,” Kent says. “It’s just that time of year.” He pulls on a hoodie. He rarely goes without thick clothes these days. People comment on the prominence of his collarbones and elbows, otherwise. “I’ll check in with Toby, see if he’s got any recommendations for keeping the fat on.”

“Good idea,” says their coach, his relief evident. “Let me know what he says.”

Kent does not go see Toby. He doesn’t want to hear what he already knows.

\--

A game against the Schooners is where it all goes to shit. Kent gets plowed into the boards and he can’t get up again. Time is skewed and data escapes him. Light rings in his ears and voices burn his eyes. Somehow, they get him to a doctor.

“Concussion,” Kent manages to catch through the fog in his head. If he had the tears for it, he’d cry.

Swoops drives him home. “It’s not career-ending,” he says in an attempt to reassure.

Kent is not reassured. He says nothing. After Swoops has gotten him inside and set him up on the sofa, Kent makes an ass of himself until he convinces his best and oldest human friend to leave.

“I’ll check in on you tomorrow, jackass,” Swoops snaps as he goes.

Kent curls up on the sofa and hugs a pillow. Tears burn but won’t come. His eyes have been dry like the desert for weeks.

“Meow?” inquires Kit.

“Not now, baby,” Kent whispers. Everything is too loud. Everything hurts.

“Meow,” Kit decides, and walks all over him until she finds a place to settle down, between his neck and the back of the sofa. She starts licking his ear.

Kent falls asleep, his head pounding.

He wakes up sixteen hours later. The house is silent. Something stiff and cold is wedged between his head and the sofa.

“Mrr,” creaks Kit. Her voice is like gravel.

Carefully, Kent sits up. His head is perfectly clear. Behind him, slumped in the corner of the sofa, Kit lies limp and eyeless.

“Oh, baby.” Kent gathers her up and holds her. She’s chilly to the touch and he can barely hear her heart beating. She breathes like each lungful is her last. But she stays. Kent clings to her, waiting, his heart already breaking in preparation to revisit that moment of loss. But Kit stays. And, gradually, she warms. Just enough to feel like a body, not a corpse.

Kent takes them both into the bathroom and looks in the mirror. Color in his cheeks, light in his eyes, muscle and fat thick on his body.

“Mrr,” Kit grumbles. She stretches one paw against his chest, her blunt claws extending and catching on his shirt. In that instant, Kent feels a patch of chill grow under his skin.

He looks himself in the eyes in the mirror. The concussion is gone.

“Okay,” he says. He looks down at Kit. Her face is upturned, her eyeless gaze intent. Kent realizes, then, that he doesn’t actually know if what crawled out of the desert’s cracked earth was actually, completely his cat.

But Kent is renewed. The concussion is gone.

“Okay,” he tells Kit, and kisses her patchy forehead. She smells like the sour earth of a disturbed grave. “Okay.”

\--

“Bruh, are you sure you’re okay?”

Kent smiles and nods. “Yeah, man. Just a bad night’s sleep.”

“You’ve been having a lot of those.” The tone is doubtful.

Kent laughs. “It’s Kit. I swear she misses me so much on roadies, she can’t stand to let me sleep when I’m home. I’m good, though.”

He is. He’s learned to eat more and sleep more and keep himself warm, to ward off the chill. Especially at night, when the desert’s cold fingers creep into his backyard and come looking for heat. It looks worse than it is. And it doesn’t last. When he needs it, he knows, he’ll get it back with interest.

Someone tells him to visit the nutritionist. Kent leaves without listening.

Kit, fluffy and yellow-eyed and whole, greets him when he gets home.

**Author's Note:**

> Happy Halloween, y'all.


End file.
